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It won't do any harm to you, but I don't know what it will do to the soap. I haven't tried a high amount, but I think someone here has done it (maybe IrishLass?) but I don't remember exactly what the effect was. Something with the texture maybe. I remember it as something a little negative but...

If you get Scientific Soapmaking by Kevin Dunn you can learn to do it the best way, but it will take some dedication to get into. If you have a knack for doing analytical procedures carefully, there's a simpler technique he demonstrated in this video...

That's not actually the right conclusion. 96% is the minimum, but it's probably higher than that when you receive it. By assuming 96% you'll be using more caustic soda than you really wanted to, decreasing your superfat or potentially going a bit lye heavy under certain circumstances. Basically...

Perfect. I suspected you two would be the first to respond. I mentioned two examples of things I witnessed in the vein of bullying newcomers, and each of you was responsible for one of them.

Whatever you say, dude. Keep up the good work.

Anything mentioning Crisco shortening is definitely from the 90s or early 00s. Nobody believed that much past 2005, and there is other outdated info. Most of the best candle information is buried in CraftServer. It began life as the CandleTech board and the trove of info there is similar to the...

Nice spin. But we don't know how willing he would have been to learn if he were allowed to hang out here. We don't know this person at all. These people are judged and dispatched in short order. Frankly I think it's disgraceful. How many words have been churned out here? The are 30 posts, only 2...

I forgot something important. Castile soap made with full water is in danger of separating in the mold (oil migrating up, lye migrating down). In fact, if it looks like it didn't separate, it probably still did, just a little. That's another good reason to consider a stronger lye. (BTW, the...

I looked up the solubility of magnesium hydroxide. At 0.00064 g / 100 ml water @ 25 °C, it's essentially insoluble. A good illustration is milk of magnesia. You mixed up a dilute laxative. :)

Technically, there's no such thing as a liquid lake. Lakes are dyes that have been converted to insoluble pigments. They could be sold as a powder or dispersed in a liquid, but it doesn't make a difference. Dyes and lakes tend to be photosensitive. They will pretty much all fade in the sun, but...

I've edited the original post to change .0335 to .0333 for people who might search it out later. Why the difference? It's because I calculated some numbers in that example and then used those numbers to calculate the NaOH factor, which introduced a little rounding error. Not a big difference...

As Steve mentioned, you'll still need the citric acid or sodium citrate. That's because it's the citrate ion we are using to grab ("sequester") some of the calcium in the water and stop it from reacting with the soap to form scum. We don't use anything else to do that other than EDTA.

Hi MC. Gel depends mainly on two things, the most important one as you know being heat. Even though you added heat it simply needed more. Maybe for one reason or another this batch saponifying slowly and you didn't get a lot of heat from the reaction. If you soap cool it won't get as much of a...

Either hypothesis could be right, or they could both be somehow, in the absence of experiments to prove them. One of the effects I watched with my own eyes was the soap graining out as it formed, much as in the early stage of HP but not as dramatic because no heat. I stirred for a real long...

That recipe is pretty tricky. The lye grains out the soap just like salt would. The result is that it won't trace, or you force it by blending and it's still too weepy in the mold. The purpose of the lye excess, even though it will cure out, is unclear. I don't think we have heard of any CP soap...

Thanks for posting your experience Steve. I don't know exactly what's happening, but whatever it is seems to be the same as with sodium lactate. If anything, the acetate might be more powerful by weight, which might be meaningful from a molar perspective. Anyway, it works great. Scooter...

That makes sense, and I had forgotten. FWIW, I would emphasize the more practical instructions as being the standard approach, since a lot of people won't be able to get a COA or perform the quick titration method effectively. We don't want them to proceed based on inaccurate information...

Thanks!

Wow, nice job. The only thing I would critique is the adjustments for purity. I believe this approach has been promoted erroneously. Unless you do an assay of your caustic potash, you can't know much about it's purity. First, I think it's a little risky to suggest that people get the...

People think of RBO as an olive oil substitute, but it's a pretty different oil even if it produces a similar results under some circumstances. You generally want to substitute the same kind of oil, so I look at RBO as its own thing. It can be useful, but you can't use it in the same quantities...